“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Last night, however, one Rachel Maddow show clip proved that sometimes, left-liberals can be ignorant of basic facts and realities in our country as well. And that also is a problem.

Take this segment here:

Of course the whole purpose of the segment is to mock Congressman Jeff Flake (R, AZ.) After playing a clip of Flake saying that, concerning the stimulus package,

“thereâ€˜s also a lot of money, so-called refundable tax credits that go to those who pay no income tax.”

Mocking voice-over announcer Kent Jones had this to say:

“Clearly, anyone who thinks tax cuts and the stimulus go to people who donâ€˜t pay income taxes needs to take some personal days.”

It is truly frightening that anyone so ignorant of the basic facts of our “progressive” tax code is in charge of writing for a major news channel’s programming. Perhaps Kent has never heard of the Earned Income Tax Credit–a method of income redistribution if ever there was one–that one can claim, even if one has no income tax liability? And going further to Obama’s failed stimulus package, we have the example of his “Making Work Pay” tax credit, which according to the Wall Street Journal, “you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability.”Â Even the increasingly-partisan FactCheck.org had to admit “that’s true enough.”

Now there are two possibilities here. Either Jones and his producers do not understand the tax code, or they don’t consider it necessary to fact check segments like this one because their main audience will lap up anything they say unquestioningly. We leave it you, dear readers, which of these is the more likely scenario.

We have always thought that leftists in the media (need we repeat ourselves?) supported a redistributive tax code because they were basically in favor of income redistribution. And that is still very likely true. But perhaps some of them are so vehement in calling for more redistribution because they don’t realize that our tax code already does this. Remember this the next time one of your leftist friends talks about the rich “not paying their fair share.” Personally, we think paying less than zero income taxes is a pretty good deal.